Inside The Revolutionary Lineage That Led to Tupac

If you had to pick a single person to represent the entirety of late 20th-Century America, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Tupac Shakur. He was raised in the rubble of the revolution, the son of Afeni Shakur, a legend in her own right. Born in Lumberton, NC, where as a child she learned the meaning of community-driven resistance through the local Lumbee Indian tribe’s heroic efforts to expel the KKK from the area, Afeni moved with her parents to New York in the late ’50s, growing up to become an influential member of the New York City chapter of the Black Panthers, engaging in then-groundbreaking work providing services to the community in the place of a borderline-absentee local government. What elevated her to folk hero status, however, was the fact that she successfully defended herself in court — while pregnant with Tupac — from trumped-up terrorism charges brought by a corrupt law enforcement establishment against the so-called Panther 21. 

Pac’s stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, pioneered the use of acupuncture as a methadone alternative for heroin users (it was the ’70s) and was also part of a crew of revolutionaries who sprang Assata Shakur from prison, earning himself a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list as a result. Tupac spent his childhood bouncing around with his mom from New York to Baltimore and the Bay Area, attending arts high schools while dealing firsthand with the realities of urban poverty and the crack epidemic; as a young adult, he split his time as a touring backup dancer and roadie for the canonical dance-rap group Digital Underground (listen to Sex Packets, people!) and jetting to Atlanta to serve as the chairman of the revivalist New Afrikan Panther Party. 

Until finally, he became Tupac Tupac, he of the dorm room posters and the All Eyez on Me and the East Coast/West Coast beef and hip-hop crossover moment Juice and whatnot. Initially a political rapper, he became increasingly misunderstood by the press until he finally gave in and embraced his outlaw side, lapsing deeper and deeper into darkness until he was killed in a 1996 shooting that, along with the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. shortly thereafter, represented a true schism in hip-hop culture. The hope, the rise, the turmoil, the fall — Pac jammed so much into his short life that you can find anything you need within his story. Also, he was a commie.

If that particular detail interests you, then you will absolutely love the Irish hip-hop journalist Dean Van Nguyen’s new book Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur. The book traces the late rapper’s roots, starting with his parents’ experiences as part of the revolutionary movements of the ’60s and ’70s, before examining the rapper’s own emergence as a radical force both within and outside of music, and ultimately looking at Shakur’s rise to stardom, the tumultuous final years of his life, and how his ghost still reverberates throughout the world. Van Nguyen is honest about his Tupac fandom, but objective and unsparing about the aspects of Tupac’s life and persona that deserve criticism. The book is exhaustively reported and researched, featuring countless interviews with surviving members of the Black Panthers who were his parents’ contemporaries, as well as rappers and producers who were around Tupac at pivotal moments in his life. 

This spring, I spoke to Van Nguyen about Tupac’s global appeal, what it must have been like to grow up among people who were targets of the state, Suge Knight as Tony Soprano precursor, and what Tupac might be like if he were alive today. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

You’re an Irish music journalist, and Tupac is the ultimate symbol of American hip-hop. What about Tupac and his story resonated with you?

The book was always driving towards the question of “Why is Tupac such a global symbol?” He’s transcended the music to become this symbol of revolution on almost a Che Guevara scale. When you see Tupac's image, it evokes a certain feeling of resistance or rebellion. And I've seen that in Ireland, too. I was in school in the late '90s, early 2000s, and Tupac was the one artist who resonated with everyone. 

So it was always kind of like driving to that question of why and how it came to be. I understood that this was partly a result of his Panther background, like the idea that he's of this revolutionary lineage.

One thing that struck me when reading the book was the realization that America has this very short memory. People forget that in the late ’60s, early ’70s, there were real revolutionaries in America. We sort of paper over this stuff and sanitize the key figures in the movement, including people around Tupac’s parents, both morally and politically. Meanwhile, Ireland doesn’t do that in the least — it’s actually examined and internalized as part of your history. 

I think that’s why Tupac resonates amongst a lot of people in places like Ireland. We have a history of resisting colonization and rebellion, while the US has a ludicrously stable political history in terms of how it treats the Constitution as a set of codes to live by rather than something that should be malleable.

I think that Tupac being in the lineage of the Panthers is something that on a surface level enhances his iconography, but what I really thought was important to get into in the book is what that actually meant. We’ve boiled the Black Panthers down to the leather jackets and the fist in the air and the guns, and what gets left out is that they were this overtly Marxist movement. They were in league with organizations of all races — they saw capitalists as the oppressors and the global proletariat as their kin. It was important to me to tell their stories. Most of the surviving Panthers now are quite elderly. I really got a great sense from talking to them and other revolutionaries of their era that there was a real motivation to get their stories out there as much as possible. I think a lot of them have resolved that they’re not going to go to jail for telling a lot of this stuff. 

It’s also important to know that Tupac grew up in the aftermath of the revolution that never came. The crushing of the spirit of the sixties and early seventies left a real hardship on that generation of activists. I think Tupac would have grown up in this era of regret and bitterness — a lot of his mother’s comrades were in prison or had been killed by the authorities. I think that this really shaped his outlook. When he came of age, he wasn’t simply looking to bring the Panthers’ message to the forefront; I think he inherently knew that he needed to update that messaging for the nineties and saw rap music as a great way of doing that. Not just in terms of verbally getting his message across in his music, but in terms of how much rap music scared the establishment. It was a great way of striking back at the authorities and the power structure. 

From reading your book, it feels like Tupac was this throughline of American history. His and his family’s story touches on everything from the Lumbee Indians to the Panther 21 and his stepfather’s role in Assata Shakur’s prison break, then the crack epidemic, the commercialization of hip-hop, and all these different cultures and regions that Tupac spent time in as a kid. It feels like he was this genuine product of the arc of history, and his life plays out almost like that arc in miniature. 

It really is this incredible fifty or sixty-year saga of two generations of this family. They’re not only very directly involved in this period of history, but their lives intersect with so much. One of the things that influenced that was the documentary series OJ: Made in America, which while telling the story of OJ Simpson’s life is able to tangentially tell the story of the second half of 20th-century Black American history. 

I was talking to people he went to school with for the book and I mentioned Mutulu, his stepfather who was at the time on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. I asked one woman if she knew that at the time and she was like, “No one had any clue.” It was just part of this extraordinary life he led from such a young age. It was such an interesting and wide-spanning story to try and tell. The themes just kind of slot into place in terms of the story. 

I think about how Pac’s mom spent years being surveilled by COINTELPRO, and then as he gets older, he develops this paranoia that Bad Boy Records is filling that COINTELPRO role in his life, and it’s almost a rational mindset because of his mother’s own experiences. 

Yeah. It’s interesting, because we’re living in an age of disinformation or even conspiracy theories, and there’s a tendency among the left to position itself as anti-conspiracy theory. But when it comes to things like Tupac’s murder, although I don’t subscribe to most of the conspiracy theories — I tend to believe that the most obvious answer around his death is the correct one — if you lived through things like the murder of Fred Hampton, the murder of MLK, the cases that were brought against some of these people, it’s not crazy to suspect that an influential Black artist in the nineties would could have some very high-level enemies in the US establishment. I felt like it was worth bringing this conversation about how we talk about power and authority to the forefront. I think the Panther 21 trial is much more forgotten than the Chicago Seven trial, even though at the time it was like the most expensive and longest trial in New York history. It was obviously a major part of the story, but it’s certainly useful to revisit that and see that the use of power as a subversion tactic against revolutionary groups is something that’s always been prevalent. 

I’ve been watching a lot of old Tupac interviews lately, and from those, I get the impression that there was a very intense self-awareness about his public image. It felt like he understood that being a gangster rapper in and of itself was a role, and it was one he felt ambivalent about, or something he tried to balance with his more activist upbringing. What do you make of that?

Tupac was certainly capable of being this wise guy who said profound things, and he also made music that was incredibly misogynistic and violent. I don’t necessarily view him as unique in that manner, but he was a genius rap artist. He wasn’t like a Huey P. Newton who had an interest in presenting fully rounded political ideas, but he had this amazing ability to speak from the heart and verbalize his code of ethics and what he felt to be right. He had a real hatred of wealth inequality. I think that when we talk about Tupac the public figure, particularly after he died, he’s partially become the symbol that people feel they need. 

One thing I came to feel more of while researching the book was that he had a tendency to be a chameleon who’d change depending on who he was around. When his music career was starting out, he’d be onstage with Digital Underground as a backup dancer getting the crowd going, and at the same time he’s being the chair of the New Afrikan Panthers youth group and he’s around these like-minded revolutionary kids.

I guess the arc of his life is that he goes from this deep-thinking kid towards someone who has this tendency not just to rap about violence but actually commit violence. I do think that’s explained by the people who he surrounded himself with, the ultimate of course being Suge Knight, who I think has always been accepted as a negative influence on him. The fact that he made some of his greatest music on Death Row is just one of his ultimate contradictions. He probably made some of his most lasting art towards the end of his life, but it probably set him on a path that ultimately led to his death. 

His social circle became a big part of his sexual abuse case. He claimed that he was legally innocent, but felt that he was morally guilty because he didn’t stand up for the victim at the time to prevent members of his entourage from assaulting her. I’m not exactly sold on his side of the story, but it indicates he was aware that the fact that he was this chameleon was a problem for him. 

It was important to me to go deeper into that case than I think most other depictions of him did. I tried hard to present the case as much through the victim’s side of the story as I could and have a fair look at what he was charged with and how things went with the jury. [Editor's Note: In 1993, a woman who’d been casually seeing Shakur accused him of forcing her to engage in sex acts with him and members of his entourage; the next year, he was tried on charges of sex abuse, sodomy, and illegal weapons possession which stemmed from the incident. Per Words for My Comrades, the jury was nearly hung after a chaotic deliberation period and ultimately found Shakur guilty of a single count of sex abuse for groping the woman, “a compromise that none felt reflected reality.”]

I think I came to the conclusion that I don’t have a good answer in terms of how other people should feel about this. I think it’s fascinating that his reputation has survived it. It seems to be different for celebrities who died pre-MeToo. The idea of not speaking ill of the dead is actually quite powerful. 

His arrest is also an inflection point in Tupac's life. Because he gets arrested, he needs money to pay his lawyers, which leads to him booking this feature he’s supposed to record with [Bad Boy Records affiliate] Little Shawn at Quad Studios in Manhattan, which is where he gets shot. Then one of the guys who arrested him for his assault happens to show up on the scene, which is crazy. So he’s going from a bad place to a worse place. He’s been taking all these acting jobs to help pay his legal bills on top of supporting his family, but now he’s broke and in jail with all of these financial obligations. Then, he’s granted a mistrial and he has this opportunity to get out on bail but can’t afford it, then who shows up but Suge Knight, the boogeyman of gangster rap himself, with this Faustian bargain written on a piece of paper that locks Pac into this predatory contract in exchange for his freedom. Once Tupac is out, he’s trying to fulfill his contract as quickly as possible but also trying to embody Death Row because he’s also this chameleon-style guy. So it’s almost like he spent the final year of his life descending into madness while trying to claw his way out. 

It does make you think about how he spent the last year of his life. He’s been in prison for quite a while, which obviously puts a strain on your mentality. He’s only out on bail, so he’s still facing this abyss knowing he could return to jail. He’s under massive financial pressures, he’s a drinker, he smokes weed, he seems to be working all the time. He’s just active all the time, no breaks, no relief. I don’t know how anyone could function like that without burning out or having some sort of mental breakdown, yet he’s making some of the greatest rap music I think we’ve ever heard. 

It goes back to the fact that his life was this incredible story with incredible characters in it. Suge Knight was such a fun character to write about. You can apply so many different cartoonish adjectives to the guy. When you see his reported use of intimidation tactics to build this huge juggernaut in such a small amount of time, the stories of how contracts were signed, some of the business deals he used to push people out of the picture, just the pure iron will he had, the amount of fear he elicited is comical in a way. What doesn’t get talked about is that he had good instincts for what the market wanted. He can bend the whole music industry to his will. And of course, it can’t last. It’s such a classic trope — you hit this unbelievable high and it comes down just as fast. 

He's like Tony Soprano.

But for the fact that The Sopranos starts a few years after this, people probably would've said he was one of the guys that Suge was trying to mirror.

You write about how All Eyez on Me feels like the album where Pac’s saying, “Okay, you guys thought I was a gangster rapper back when I was making ‘Dear Mama'? Well, now I really am a gangster rapper, and you’re gonna get a gangster rap album.” Given Tupac’s background of having gone to high schools for the arts and not only being trained as an actor but actually being this incredibly talented actor, I almost think of his Death Row era as him going full Method. 

Saying he went full Method is an interesting way of putting it. There was this malleability to him, which I don’t think always served him well or gave him an easier life. Even the imagery that he and Suge left behind, they’d quite often be similarly dressed. Tupac was a small guy in stature, and Suge was massive. He wasn’t much older than Tupac, but he looks big brotherly, if not fatherly, when you see the two of them together.

His role in the Tupac story points again to Pac’s duality. From everything I’ve learned and all the people I spoke to, everything points to the fact that Tupac did not want to stay on Death Row long term. He had rebuffed Suge’s advances before he went to prison, so signing was very much a means to the end for him to get out. His idea was he’d fulfill his contract as soon as he possibly could. But then you listen to the music and see him out with Suge, and he’s so fully committed to Death Row. Maybe that was just his personality. He did nothing by half, so if he was on Death Row, he was all in. 

It comes up quite a bit in the book, that Tupac was always trying to fashion this imperfect father figure out of these shards that he was presented with. Early on it was these guys who, when he was young, served this kind of step-fatherly role even though they had their own personal problems and weren’t around for very long, and I think it really does carry on into adulthood. These kinds are scars, they’re lifelong scars, you know? I think there was an element of that in their relationship, like why not Suge as the ultimate protector? In Dublin, when we were kids we’d say, “I’m gonna get me dad after you.” Suge was almost the ultimate one of those. 

You write about how Tupac auditioned to play Bubba in Forrest Gump. He was in talks to play Mace Windu in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. He gave these classic performances in Juice and Poetic Justice, and he held his own opposite Tim Roth and Thandie Newton in Gridlock’d. What was the perception of him like as an actor during his life? 

There’s been this idea in recent years that like Tupac was a better actor than he was a rap artist. I think that's like probably hipster bullshit, to be honest. 

I think that he made some very good movies. They weren’t big movies — he was far more known for being a music-maker slash headline maker, a tabloid controversialist type who got a ton of media coverage — but I think that had he lived, he probably would have become a full-blown movie star, somewhere in between what Ice Cube and Will Smith became. 

Maybe the ideal Tupac who successfully extricates himself from the turmoil of Death Row ends up being a combination of Killer Mike and Mahershala Ali, but on a bigger scale. 

I think that’s probably spot-on. It’s funny, because Tupac did make a pretty bad movie called Bullet. Mickey Rourke in it, I think it went direct-to-video. But it’s got some actors in it. Peter Dinklage is in it, Adrien Brody is in it. I would have liked to have spoken to Adrien Brody about his memories of Tupac. 

So my final question is, while researching and reporting out the book, did you come across any fun Tupac facts?

Marlon Wayans was there the night of both Tupac and Biggie’s deaths. When Tupac left his hotel the night he was shot, he ran into Marlon Wayans. A few months after that, he was at the Vibe Magazine party that Biggie attended before he was shot. He’s said he talked to Biggie that night. He did a movie not that long ago with Rashida Jones, so that’s another Tupac connection. She’s a person who I would not think of as being from that era at all. Like, I picture her coming along ten years later, but she got to know Tupac quite well while he was engaged to her sister Kidada. 

This is now making me realize that Rashida Jones is married to Ezra Koenig from Vampire Weekend, which means that Ezra Koenig is married to Tupac’s friend. It’s a reminder that people don’t just go away — they reverberate in these weird ways. 

Tupac would only be 54 today. That’s almost the same age as Jay-Z and a lot of other people who are still at the forefront of the pop cultural sphere. Like, Tupac was in their cohort. 

Drew Millard is a writer from North Carolina. He lives in Philadelphia.